Continuing on from our August 2009 post on the Quarterly Household Survey (QHS), Q1 2009, this is a look at employment and unemployment in the Republic, Oct-Dec ‘08 to Oct-Dec ‘09, based on the QHS Q4 2009.
We know that due to the government’s active pursuit of deflation, Ireland’s GNP shrank by world-beating 11.3% in 2009. [...]

As with the first article in this series, forgotten faces is more of a discussion piece than a finished analysis. It’s only in the later issues of The Ripening of Time, especially nos. 11 and 13 which date from 1979 and 1980 respectively, that we get a full and detailed Marxist analysis of Ireland in [...]

Last month Tom Redmond of the CPI gave me a large collection of newspapers and pamphlets relating to the Irish left, including all fourteen issues of The Ripening of Time (1976-1982), an Irish Marxist journal produced by the Ripening of Time collective.
Throughout its six-year run, The Ripening of Time provided introductions to Marxist theory, as [...]

Below is a clip from an interview with Sam Nolan of the Dublin Council of Trade Unions, where Sam discusses the 1979 tax marches. It’s taken from a series of interviews which have been conducted with Sam, and which chart his life as a political and trade union activist, going as far back as the [...]

Ostensibly an official history, John Cunningham’s study of the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI), and its relationship with the education system, also touches on four key elements of Irish society over the past 100 years: religion, class, politics and economics. It looks at the changes in Ireland since the foundation of the association [...]

[Migrant Rights Centre Ireland writes:]
Today the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (MRCI) is launching a pamphlet that critiques Ireland’s political leadership on migration, and its commitment to equality in the current recession.
The political pamphlet, Hidden Messages: Overt Agendas, was written by Niall Crowley, equality expert and former CEO of the Equality Authority. It compares the [...]

New Capitalism? The Transformation of Work by Kevin Doogan (Wiley Press, 2009)
The subtitle of this book is slightly misleading: the book’s focus is not so much the transformation of work in recent years, but rather the distance between the discussion of work by academics, journalists, and politicians, and the material reality of work in the [...]

[An open letter to the Government: Signatories are listed below]
THE GOVERNMENT’S economic strategy is failing. The Irish recession has been deeper and longer than almost any other in the industrialised world.
Consumer spending has collapsed while at the same time unemployment and emigration have soared. Crucially, investment has plummeted off the chart. Not only have Government [...]

[Padraig Yeates writes:]
There is a petition to protest at the deportation of John Recto, his wife Liezel and their three children to the Philippines Ireland at www.teeu.ie and we would ask you to sign it.
ICTU General Secretary David Begg and TEEU General Secretary Designate Eamon Devoy have written to the Naturalisation and Immigration Service seeking [...]